


A Gorgeous Hotel

by LiquidMirrors



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Body Horror, Dissociation, Dream Logic, Horror, Mentioned Helen | The Distortion (The Magnus Archives), Original Character(s), Original Statement (The Magnus Archives), POV Original Character, Psychological Horror, Spoilers for Episode: e187 Checking Out (The Magnus Archives), Spoilers for The Magnus Archives Season 5, Stalking Themes, The Spiral Fear Domain (The Magnus Archives), The Spiral Fear Entity (The Magnus Archives), broken logic, sorta?, spoilers for mag 187, unreality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-15
Updated: 2020-11-15
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:33:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27571606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LiquidMirrors/pseuds/LiquidMirrors
Summary: From a Concierge at an unnamed Hotel before a Guest of Honor is to arrive.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 2





	A Gorgeous Hotel

You should see it.

From my own perspective, it  _ isn’t _ a shifting conundrum. Instead, I view it more as… a Rubik’s Cube, but in the eyes of someone who knows how to solve it. The exit to the hotel is  _ there _ , but you have to know how to find it. You might have to  _ twist _ yourself a little, but nonetheless, it is fine!

I walk down the carpeted halls, hands folded behind my back. It’s better that way for now, since I never let people see my back. Even if they could get the jump on me, I wouldn’t want them to see my fingers, jaundiced and sharpened points. It's a surprise for later, something I reveal to them if they even have the capability to break through their scattered thoughts and notice.

I know one of the doors is unlocked, and I enter without knocking. There is a man inside the room, sitting on the bed with his head in his hands. When he looks up at me, his face is scrunched into an expression of weariness and unease. Stubble, bags under his eyes, ragged and wrinkled clothes - he obviously hasn’t slept in a good amount of time. He asks me who I am, and I bow at the waist, a smile on my face.

I say that I am the concierge, and that he called saying there was a problem with his room.

He stammers out yes, yes he called, but he’s not sure he remembers when he did. He asks me if this room usually has any problems. When I smile at him again, my teeth shift in my mouth and my tongue clicks against them, dry and pallid.

I make a joke about the dreadful wallpaper, and he takes that thread and pulls. His eyes spark with something - recognition, a memory, something fleeting within the recesses of his thoughts. He asks me, in full clarity, what color the wallpaper is. I turn to the wall next to us. It is blue, with flowers on it that smell like asbestos and dry plaster. It looks blue, but it was pink and red and green and yellow, all of these without a single repair or refurbish. Still, they had cycled, and he wouldn’t be none the wiser, because he hadn’t seen a single person enter this room in a very long while.

I wouldn’t say I count, either.   
  
I reach a hand out and dig it into the wallpaper. It folds around my fingers and palm, soft and pulsating, almost like it's alive - and it is, in its own way. Helen will have a talking-to ready for me about it later, but do I really care? The blue wallpaper curls and peels away from me, like I am a rotting vein in healthy skin - an apt metaphor, although we here do not associate with the sickness. The room burps and coalesces before us and I can feel my pupils split and scatter while the man sitting on the bed clutches at the sides of his head, wailing in pain. When I remove my hand from the wall, the wallpaper is now yellow. I turn back to the man, curled up into a fetal position on the bed that is his own in our wonderful establishment.

“The wallpaper is blue,” I say, satisfied, before walking out of the room. I tap on the open doorway with my fingers, turning back towards the broken man.   
  
“Please, don’t be afraid to call if you need assistance.” I smile at him again. Soon, he will call that number, in need of help, but he won’t be able to put his finger on why my face upsets him so. No matter, since he will soon fall back into the cycle again. A fleeting fancy passes through me as I pick at my nails and wander through the building - maybe next time, I’ll lock him outside of his hotel room. Or even better…   
  
I round a corner. Then another. Then another.

...maybe I’ll let him fall through the walls like I did with the others…   
  
There is an abandoned birdcage trolley in the center of the hall. It must be needed, and if it is not, no matter, a good addition to the concierge that I am and have always been in this place. The doors shift and collapse and the hallway shudders closed, and for a second I am left in-between the walls with nothing but a birdcage trolley. No matter. In this middlespace I reach out my hands and make contact - something gives slightly and I gently push my fingers through it. It stretches and bends before bursting entirely, and I feel the vaguely rough edges of it flecked with a tackiness. Canvas and paint, my thoughts collide into each other as I push myself through the painting.

Light. The light of the room isn’t blinding per se, but it is quite unusual to see light after crawling from a lightless place. I don’t notice the screaming woman standing in the farthest corner of the room, and yet she points at me and yells at me to leave her alone. Funny, really - her reaction is very much justified as I’d been leaving hints of myself around her for a good while. A photograph hidden within a book, the paintings of scenery suddenly depicting a lounging figure in a concierge outfit, quickly and surely spiralling into a looming figure where the sun becomes my eyes and the reflections in the bathroom mirror shine with my smile. She cut herself on a razor, I believe, a fairly normal accident, yet it wasn’t a razor at all, but it was, though at the same time it was my fingernails grazing across her skin.

She knows me, she has seen me and she is screaming at me to leave her alone. I open my mouth to respond but I know what is coming; instead of words flows reams and reams of paper, printed with words I’ve read and already become in order to torment her - bible verses, implanted instincts, the concierge that served the Romans and who turned the key to let Jesus into the cave filled with hungering lions. And the concierge turns to the reader and confronts his own being and how it is only one layer of many before he can breach the surface for air, a passage she has read over and over in a panic, worrying and anticipating the moment that that very concierge would knock on her door, although it is worse because I am not at her door, instead clawing through her wall, vomiting reams of bloodstained pages that screamed to her in the nights that she could not rest.   
  
When I fully dislodge myself from the wall, I crawl on my arms and legs towards her. My outfit is properly ripped and torn and my eyes are only sclera, although I can still feel them rapidly shifting in my sockets. My arms stretch and distend as my legs crack and creak as I make my way across the carpet towards her. The deluge of paper spilling from my throat has stopped, but now it has been replaced with the chimes of bells, desk bells, concierge calls, the cooks in the kitchen ringing in their requests for new meals, and I go right up to the woman’s face and stop the cacophony before asking her if she requires assistance in a voice I had practiced many times before, a voice that chimes like commercials from the 50s and holds the very same amount of spite and vitriol and poisonous rage boiling just underneath the surface. My smile is bulbous and wide, lips cut and dripping blood, and she faints.

The wall behind me seals up as I get to my feet, brushing off the dust and plaster sticking to my concierge uniform. It would re-fit itself, mending thread and button and sewn soon enough, but for now, I leaned over and grabbed the woman by the feet, lifting her up and placing her on the bed. I plucked out every aspect of myself hidden in the room except for the initiating figure, a small calling card I left on the bedside table a long time ago. On it was written a number, with a photo of myself next to the confusing mass of digits. I grimace at the photo when I see it again, as it seems that it was plucked from before the… before my employment was  _ upgraded _ , to say the least. Ragged clothes and tired eyes, not unlike the man I so pleasantly broke. No matter, no matter. When the woman wakes up again, she will be marked with that same looming unease as before, and soon my cycle will start over again. A slight bore, but I do rather enjoy finding new ways to seep into her life. Next time, the television screen will broadcast my rambling voice, and my fingers will curl in through the holes in the sink drain.

After cleaning out the room, exiting, and placing a DO NOT DISTURB hanger on the doorknob, I see that the birdcage trolley was waiting out for me in the hallway. A delight! I step on the mini platform with one foot and push off the floor with the other, rushing down the hall swiftly, momentum doesn’t matter in this place as the floors tilt and guide me along the routes of mania. I pass a great many doorways and fire alarms and hallways, yet I only pass a few staring faces. The first is the mother, the one looking for her son. Our eyes meet and she reaches a hand out to me, begging for help, her palms and fingers covered in blisters and her hair frazzled. As her mouth opens into an “o” to cry out to me, I have already passed the corner, and I won’t be there when she looks down that hall. The next fretful scrabbler I see is the man struggling to open the door to his room, the one who says his wife, his life, all of it is just past there, and he just needs to push through. He doesn’t notice much other than the doorknob, yet as I pass, he makes eye contact with me. As I did with the mother, I smile at him, never breaking eye contact. My neck twists much farther than it should to stare at him as I pass. While this didn’t bother the mother, or she didn’t notice, he recoils at my appearance. Again, I have passed, and now I rush through the halls again. A dead end approaches, floral wallpaper burning my gaze, and the cart isn’t slowing a single bit.

No matter.

The birdcage trolley crashes into the wall, rupturing elevator music and muffled carpet, a clang and silence-shattering shout, and then I lurk within the wallpaper, pasted onto the wall like an awful art project. I can still shift and move, and angle to the floor, sifting and shifting under the carpet as I make my way back to the front desk. Helen tells me that we have a special guest approaching, and she will escort him through her corners herself. She asks me to man the desk, and although I know that I am not a multiplicity like her, I will be able to keep tabs on my very own. The dinner bells ring as I pass the kitchen, staring at plastic foods and roasts that are hollowed and dry - the smell is delicious and sickly-sweet and I can see fly corpses peppering the floor tiles like birthmarks.

No matter, no matter!

The lighting is beautiful and the guests are stressed and I run through the halls, pulling myself into new formations for every moment of my momentous momentary existence in this wonderful place.

A very wonderful place indeed.

**Author's Note:**

> God, I love the Spiral. Made this as a sort of experiment - something I came up with after listening to MAG 187 a couple of times. Its a shame we won't see Helen anymore, but it was still an absolutely amazing episode.


End file.
